When we moved from standard definition to HD, I was very happy. There was a noticeable improvement in image quality. With SD, pixels were sometimes visible and images were soft. HD provided far better resolution. When we moved to 4K, I was a little confused...

Make Bad Art!By William Vaughan“All art is an intensely vulnerable gesture, and it is made with no small amounts of risk, and fear.” – Steven Erikson I was recently working with a large group of designers with years of traditional and digital illustration experience...

As our reputation for vfx training grows, we get more and more calls from various people asking us to do complex visual effects and animation for free. After all, students don’t expect to be paid. They need experience, right? And what do they do in the evenings when...

Enough of rants and raves for now. Let’s talk about something great. One of my favorite things about Houdini is the diagnostic tool used to identify missing images in a render. When your average render engine goes to do a job, it begins by loading referenced...

Recently I was part of an interesting discussion about doing things the “correct” way in a VFX production pipeline. Specifically, we were talking about scene scale and relative object scale. In general it is a good idea to build geometry to “correct” scale and to...

I have worked with hundreds of digital artists over the years, many of whom distinguish between what they call “Contact Shadows” and what they call “Cast Shadows”. Cast shadows, we are told, are the sharp shadows you can see cast by an object that is lit by a light...